In His Image: F(r)iction
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In which Dean suspects words are not entirely reliable, and a town is mysteriously not destroyed. Dean, Sam.
“Ready to go, Sammy?”
Sam was frowning at his laptop.
“Did you mess with my computer?”
Dean tossed the second fake CDC ID toward him, and Sam caught it without looking up. “Haven’t touched it for days, why?”
“Some kind of a virus, maybe. I don’t know, though - I usually have it locked down pretty good.”
“Eating anything important?”
“No, it looks like a joke program. Take a look at this.”
Sam turned the computer around and pushed it across the table toward him. The screen was covered with an image of some old manuscript in a handwriting that Dean couldn’t have read even if it had been in English (Sam had said it was called Lucy Miniscule or something, but Dean thought it kind of looked like Maggi noodles). The only thing out of place was a bright yellow pop-up like a post-it note that had appeared in the very middle of the screen.
The font of the note was even more obnoxious than the manuscript.
bl useless, big donors too anglican for the hot stuff :P
“Weird.” Dean slid the laptop back. “Mean anything to you?”
“I’m guessing BL is the British Library. That’s where I downloaded this manuscript facsimile from last night. Maybe it just grabs your browser history and makes stupid comments about it.”
Sam sounded dubious, and he was probably right - since when had anything in their life been simple and accidental as a joke virus? - but as omens of impending doom went, it ranked fairly low on the scale. Far below, just for example, Pestilence and potential outbreaks of Croatoan.
“Worry about it later, dude. If this whole town goes zombie apocalypse on us they’ll probably smash your computer anyway.”
Dean grabbed his jacket, as Sam made Pissy Bitchface #24 with a side order of Distracted Geek and got up to follow. Then stopped.
“Uh. Dean.”
There was an edge to his voice that had Dean crossing back across the room without thinking and leaning in over his shoulder to look. Another note had appeared over the first.
btw, u guys lucky angels fail @ internet: accessing all horsemen+rings sites out there + bustyasianbeauties = dead giveaway.
“… Okay, so not just a virus.”
“Really not. And not some weird messaging thing either.” Sam pointed at the red x on the network icon in the taskbar. “I disabled the wireless before that one popped up.”
Dean gave the laptop a dark look. It sat there, smugly continuing with its new lifestyle choice of displaying annoying yellow sticky notes. “You think a demon could possess a computer?”
“Never heard of it.” Sam turned off the computer, unplugged it, then removed the battery. “Although I’m pretty sure it happened in Buffy.”
“I am not related to you.” Sam grinned at him, a bright, unexpected flash of teeth. Dean tossed Sam’s jacket over to him and dug out his keys. “Let’s go, champ.”
---
The Impala’s frame creaked welcomingly as Dean slid into the driver’s seat, chasing away the sickly clean stench of hospital with warm leather and gun oil. The passenger door clicked snugly shut as Sam got in next to him, switching his phone to his other hand to buckle his seatbelt.
“Swine flu, huh? Ours too.”
Dean kept half an ear to the conversation as he pulled out, Sam’s familiar isn’t-this-insane-shit-fascinating tones and the faint grumble of Bobby’s voice. Hospital car parks were always a weird maze of strident emergency signs and inconvenient corners, like each new wing or building had just sort of sprung up where a seed had fallen and the car parks had had to hunch back out of the way as they grew.
“I don’t know, Bobby. I don’t think they would make a mistake, not about that. Everyone’s so paranoid about swine flu just now, you know?”
“Ask him if he’s been sending us weird-ass messages about the British Library being Anglican.”
Sam made a face at Dean and shook his head, covering up the mouthpiece just long enough to hiss, “Bobby calls us ‘boys’, not ‘guys’.”
At least having a definite plan seemed to be doing Sam good, even if it was sort of half-cocked and impossible. He’d actually smiled twice since morning, and he had gone from the tight, full-body hunch of the last few weeks to that sort of loose-limbed, eager quiver he got in the middle of a good job, a job he thought they had a decent chance of fixing. Shame Pestilence was such a slippery bastard.
And that Sam had apparently started the sneaking out at night thing again.
“Where? Hang on.” Sam made grabby hands at the air, and Dean fished the glove box’s pen and notepad out of his pocket for him. “Okay. We’ll swing by on our way through. Yeah, I know, Bobby. We’ll be careful. You too.”
He finished scribbling, then tucked his phone into his jeans. Dean glanced sideways at him.
“Checking out?”
Sam nodded, pulling out a map from the glove box and spreading it over his knees. “Another outbreak a couple of hours northeast. Could be we can head Pestilence off there.” From the corner of his eye, Dean could make out the movement of Sam’s hands, and didn’t need to look to know that he was tracing over the roads with his right middle finger, same as always, not quite touching the paper, with his bottom lip sucked in and his hair falling over his cheek. Sam liked to have a visual of where they were going in his head, even though he didn’t drive all that often, even though Dean never used a map unless he had to. “After that, if we can, there’s a small town and a few farms not that far east of… Johnson Lake…” - his finger tapped on the paper, satisfied as he found it - “that just dropped right off the grid three months back, after a swarm of demonic signs. Name of Repton. Bobby figures we might as well swing by and see if there’s anything we can do, or anything useful we can pick up.”
Dean grunted. “After three months? Poor bastards will be dust by now.”
“Guess so. Can’t hurt to take a look, though.” Sam frowned distantly at the little spot on the paper that represented the lives of hundreds of people who had probably already died bloody. A few years ago there would have been a trembling lip and puppy-dog eyes; but they were months into the Apocalypse, and if you started cracking to pieces over the dead it’d grind you into sand.
No matter who they were. Or what parts of you they took with them.
Dean concentrated on the road.
After a minute Sam looked up. “Hey, could you drop me off at that Starbucks on the corner up here while you grab our stuff? I want to check out the history of this place, and I don’t want to use the motel’s internet if whoever that was this morning got a fix on the IP there.”
Dean was pulling over before Sam was done explaining himself - and really, end of days, it wasn’t as if he had to make up elaborate excuses to indulge his addiction to girly syrupy coffee drinks. He could do a hell of a lot worse.
Amphetamines, for example.
Dean ignored the sort of pissy look Sam threw at him as he got out of the car, because he didn’t really have much to say.
It took him ten minutes to grab everything at the motel and check out, four of those spent waiting for the skinny kid at the desk to answer the bell. She was too made up, and looked kind of woebegone, in that my-life-is-the-ultimate-tragedy way teenagers got before they started noticing that everyone else was even more fucked up than they were.
He stretched his face into a smile, and told her it wasn’t the end of the world. She looked tempted to flip him off.
In the coffee shop, Sam was hunched over one of those stupidly tiny tables that always made him look far too big. Between his computer, his hands, and the handles of the stroller belonging to the mother at the next table, there was barely any space for his actual coffee. He was giving the screen his you-have-perplexed-me-tiny-minion frown - or rather, Dean saw as he edged his way between tables, not the screen, but the two new yellow notes that had popped up in one corner. One was a url, mostly a long list of letters and numbers, and the other said,
don’t summon anyone who wants your heads on a plate. or your asses.
Hey, a stalker virus that gave good advice. Advice Winchesters were pretty much guaranteed not to follow.
“Chatting up your computer again, Sam?”
Sam started a little as Dean dropped into the chair beside him, then waved a hand at the screen. “Dean, hey. Just checking a bit of local history to see when anyone last heard from our ghost town, and this popped up.” He alt-tabbed into the browser, which was pointing to the url on the note: some kind of fancy-ass kitchenware website, specifically, the product-ordering page for an expensively plain-looking wooden spoon.
Dean raised his eyebrows. “Sinister. What does it summon? Japanese tentacle chefs?”
Sam took an unnecessarily long pull of his frilly coffee drink. “It’s made of aged rosemary wood. There’s a - a ritual I stumbled across that might give us a hand against Pestilence if we can get it working, and one thing it needs is the warm ash of wood from a rosemary bush that’s been dead at least ten years. Only no one ever lets a rosemary bush get that big. I was looking on ebay and all these occult websites this morning, but couldn’t find anything.” He pulled a wry face. “Guess I should have tried thinking like a normal person.”
“They deliver?”
“Every state.” Sam pulled up his email client and forwarded the link to Bobby, with a quick note.
The thing was, Dean was starting to think he didn’t actually know how to talk to Sam anymore.
Which made no sense. They practically had a script for every possible conversation, everything from debating how likely it was that a suspect was their guy with a couple of quirks of their eyebrows, to the kind of banter called for by Sam asking Dean to pick him up a particular kind of salad for lunch after Dean had spent most of the morning slacking off and only pretending to do research. Or whatever. The point was, he knew every twitch of the kid’s hands and every possible way he had of saying Dean’s name.
Except he wasn’t a kid now.
Dean drummed his fingers on the table. “So whoever this is, they want us to think they’re helpful.”
Sam shrugged. “So far they are. If they’d linked me to some private supplier on email or something I would have thought it was a trap, but this is a big national chain. They can’t exactly tamper with everything it sends out.” He clicked send, and made to shut the computer.
Dean leaned forward and reached for it. “Gonna try something.”
Sam let him take the computer, and he clicked on the second of the yellow notes. A blinking cursor appeared. Dean narrowed his eyes at it and typed,
our asses are delicious, pal.
Sam snorted next to him. Dean hit return, in case it made a difference, and sat back to watch the screen.
Nothing happened.
“So it’s a one-way thing, or it just doesn’t want to talk to us,” Sam decided.
“Looks like.” Dean closed the laptop and shoved it into Sam’s bag. “Why can’t you ever pick up normal stalkers? Angels and demons and computer worms, man. You should try getting stalked by some nice, innocent chick like everyone else.”
Sam smirked at him as he wove his way out between tables and soccer moms. “What, you mean like Becky?”
Dean made a pained noise. “Dude, she writes stories about us. Even in our lives, that’s not exactly poster-child normal.”
Perfectly ordinary Winchester conversation, nothing to see here. No thought required.
---
The second town was swine flu too. Pestilence was long gone. He was probably sniggering at them, wherever he was.
Sam said he wasn’t sure anthropomorphic personifications could snigger.
Dean pointed out that Famine had basically done nothing else, and also that Sam was a geek, and what the hell was an anthropomorphic personification anyway.
Sam announced that when this whole Apocalypse thing was over he was going to get a Kindle or something and start using all these long car hours to read Dean actual books. Starting with Pratchett and Gaiman.
Dean said he could do what he liked, because none of them were going to survive it anyway.
Sam called him a jerk.
Dean didn’t respond.
---
Dean had spent years keeping a sharp eye out for all the bits that weren’t Sam, or might not be. The dreams and other psychic shit, the possibility that the crossroads demon had brought him back wrong, anything that might have hinted at Azazel’s plans, the collaborations with Ruby, the secretiveness, the demon blood, the path that C- that the angels had kept warning Dean about, the boy king of Hell, the vessel of Lucifer. The law student who didn’t give a shit where Dad was. Years and he’d been jumping at every hint of anything that didn’t match up to the kid he remembered from - hell, from before Stanford.
He’d promised to try to find faith in Sam. He’d said he wasn’t just some snot-nosed kid Dean had to take care of anymore, and he’d meant it. There was a man there somewhere. Dean just didn’t really know where to look to see him. He was too used to seeing all the other bits, and beating them down.
If Sam was sneaking off at night again, and pretending not to be acting all jumpy and secretive about some ritual he was planning that he hadn’t told Dean about until he was caught out - well, Dean just had to try to trust him on it.
Which would be easier if they could just hold a damn conversation.
---
“Okay, here’s a thought. What if it’s not just a demon in there?” The lake fell away to their left as Dean turned onto the narrow road up towards the vanished town of Repton. The car had been silent for over an hour, leaving Dean’s thoughts skittering about in weirder and weirder directions in order to avoid any of the nasty pits it loved throwing itself into lately if he didn’t distract it. “What if the reason we can’t find Pestilence is that he’s gone modern, like that crazy wood god and Stepford Santa?”
Sam made a non-committal noise. “You mean like actual Pestilential computer viruses?”
“It’s what I’d do. Kill off communication, then bring out the biological big guns. Plus, didn’t you say the Black Death used to travel by trade routes? That’d be the internet now, right?”
“And how does linking me to rosemary wood cooking spoons help with that grand master plan, Dean?”
“You don’t watch enough zombie movies, dude. Tempting people into shady deals with smelly ladles is where it all starts.”
That got half a laugh out of Sam, a little huff of amused air. Then, “Or it’s Crowley.”
The little curl of triumph in Dean’s chest vanished. “Crowley?”
“Think about it. If any demon knew how to use the internet it’d be him. Whoever it is talks like they know us, not to mention thinks we’re morons. And pretending to help us find stuff then screwing us over?” Sam’s voice slid down a few notes, bitter and dark. “Kind of his M. O.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Although even Ca- well, Crowley hadn’t been the only one who’d been sure the Colt would work. “Whatever it is doesn’t seem like it’s vicious. So far it’s helped. And it obviously knows a lot, so either it’s really well placed or it’s sneaky as hell. Either way, could be a useful lead.”
Sam was staring at him like he had something weird on his face. “So, what, you think we should just trust it?”
Who’d suggested that? Dean hadn’t suggested that, Jesus. “Not trust it. Double-check everything it gives us, get Bobby to do any browsing that’d give the game away. Use it.” Leaving aside the fact that their big secret game plan was getting the rings, and it already knew about that. Because it was sneaky.
“Huh.” Sam wasn’t impressed. “You know Dean, I seem to remember having this conversation before. Only the other way around.”
Kid should really get that sarcasm gland looked at, it was acting up again. “Hey, whatever works.”
Then Dean was slamming his foot on the brakes, pulling her down from a hundred and skewing her around onto the verge, throwing up a wall of dust and stones. “Shit! Who the hell put that there?”
Sam was out and on his feet, gun in hand, almost before Dean had gentled the Impala to a stop. Roadblocks, generally not good news. Dean scrabbled for the Colt, dragged up the handbrake, palmed his regular pistol from his hip into his other hand on the off-chance that it was something normal and landed half-stumbling on asphalt, his back safe and solid against the sleek black metal of his baby. He could feel the press of every stone under the soles of his boots, every touch and scent of the air against his face, quick and vivid and suddenly alive. Sam was already covering the trees on either side, looking for an ambush, because that would be the most immediate threat if whoever it was wanted to attack first. No shots fired yet. Dean looked to the front, where they’d be if they wanted to talk.
Across the road, and stretching away to either side through the trees and undergrowth, was a heavy iron pipe, large enough to throw even a semi. Just far enough from the corner to stop in time, if you were actually doing the speed limit. Fifty metres or so down the road, another one. Too far to take out both with one explosion, his eyes immediately registered, unless you were working some serious ballistics. Deliberate. Barriers. Iron.
Just beyond the second pipe was a low fence, up to his chest, corrugated iron, probably shored up with something more solid. There were symbols painted on it, warding against demons and spirits and something Enochian that he didn’t recognise.
Okay. So maybe not everyone was dead. And some people knew more than the average.
Low and soft, he called, “Blue Earth, Sammy,” to make sure he didn’t just shoot on sight. Sam grunted quiet acknowledgement, somewhere on the threshold of his hearing, and Dean edged forward toward the barrier.
Foot raised, slid forward, dropped to the ground, solid footing on the far side of the first pipe. Nothing. Trees silent and still, nothing in front, only Sam behind, slipping around the Impala after him, covering him. Safe behind. He moved forward. Second pipe - nothing. Birds and insects quieter than they should be, left and to the front.
Dean slipped off the safety catch. Felt Sam follow his lead behind.
He moved forward to the fence.
… Clever. There was a devil’s trap cut into the road, but the gashes in the ground were all at an angle pointing toward the fence, so you couldn’t see them from the outside.
There was someone in the trees about twenty metres past the fence. He knew this - felt it, heard it, it didn’t matter, because he had his pistol trained on her before she stepped out into the open. It didn’t matter because she had an automatic trained on him. Which was kind of surreal, because she looked like a soccer mom.
No. She looked like she used to be a soccer mom. Pert waist and perfect complexion gone practical and muscular, cherry-red bob growing out into dirty blonde and pulled back with a barrette that did the job and really didn’t match her outfit, shoes once too bright for this job but with mud rubbed into them and trampled for hours, face closed and strong. She was at least a foot shorter than Dean. Also, holding an automatic.
“Whoa.” He held up his hands. “Easy there, lady.”
She jerked the gun briefly in the direction of a little niche set in the fence, just where it crossed the road. “Hands in the water, boys, unless your careers counsellor recommended ‘colander’.”
The fence was a double length of corrugated iron fastened hard into the earth about half a foot apart, the space between packed with hard earth and sandbags and big chunks of rock salt. There was no gate, but as it only came up to Dean’s chest, there didn’t need to be, for any halfway fit human. He could have vaulted it. Or he could lean over it and stick his hand to the wrist into the bucket of (presumably holy) water on her side of the fence.
Discretion was the better part, and all that.
Sam covered him, then he covered Sam. Just to be sure.
She watched them like a goddamn hawk that liked its steak seasoned with holy water. Then, as they shook their hands dry, “So, you boys are human. Well done. Now piss off.” And turned to go.
“What about silver?” Sam piped up beside him.
She stopped and turned halfway. “Silver?”
Dean shoved his pistol into the back of his jeans, and offered, “Sure, most of your problem right now is demons and things like that, but there’s a whole host of other plug-uglies out there being stirred up by this whole end of days shit that don’t give a damn about salt and iron.”
The woman considered them, gun propped against her hip, comfortable as a pro with its weight. Dean wondered if she had a twelve-year-old son packing salt rounds back in the town. “What kind?”
Dean shrugged. “Shapeshifters, werewolves, skinwalkers, that sort. Some other things like zombies or wraiths, which aren’t so common. Silver, salt, holy water, and iron will give you a pretty good all-round human test. Chain a candlestick to the fence or something and make them pick it up and hold it for a minute. If it burns them, silver bullets or blades will take them down.”
“We’ll bear that in mind.”
Sam smiled at her. “Do you mind if we come over, ma’am?”
Her eyes narrowed.
Sam racked up the whole wide-eyed and harmless act another notch. “It’s just we were surprised to find anyone still alive. There was a mess of demon omens around here a couple of months back, and then you dropped off the map.”
She shook her head just once, like someone used to not having to repeat herself. “We don’t let anyone in. Outside world’s going to hell and we’re going to ride it out as long as we can. See how many of those bastards we can take with us on the way.”
Dean looked over at Sam and quirked one eyebrow. Sam tightened his lips, nodded slightly, then asked earnestly, “You don’t happen to have anyone in town who… talks to angels, by any chance?”
She lifted her head, and her mouth twisted into something sardonic. Two years ago, Dean might have tried to hit that. “Angels? Which apocalypse are you watching, boy? If there ever were angels, they aren’t coming to help us.”
Dean smirked back at her, darkly. “Got that right.”
Sam gestured to the fence. “So where did you learn all this?”
“All human info, all human weapons. Someone’s got to stand up to the bastards.” She leant the gun against her leg and lit a cigarette, nursing the little glow to life between her hands. Cancer, probably not a big concern right now. “A man came by a few months back, just when things here were getting really bad. Told us what was going on, showed us a trick or two. Said those scribbles would keep out most things that were likely to come for our guts, and we’re looking after the rest ourselves.”
“This man - sounds like he’s in our line of work.” Sam tugged the collar of his shirt open just enough to let her see the anti-possession tattoo. “He give you a name?”
“Winchester. Sam Winchester.”
The hell? Dean gave Sam the something-you-want-to-tell-me? eyebrow, but Sam looked just as surprised.
“… Okay. This Sam Winchester, he look anything like my brother here?”
The smoke curled out between her lips as she flicked her eyes briefly over Sam. “Not a thing. Skinny black guy in his forties, red hair and cowboy boots.”
Dean racked his brains for a hunter matching that description, then raised his eyebrows at Sam.
Sam shrugged. “I got nothing.”
“Me neither.”
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